[0:00] Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn, you're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com. This is Sam Edwards, proud sponsor of Heritage Radio Network, Surrey Farms.com.

[0:25] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick,

[0:36] Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network. Join today with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, who's going to leave directly from here to go to Seattle for the

[0:44] modernist cuisine dinner. Portland first. Portland, where are you in Portland? Stumptown. Even though I don't, even though I don't appreciate good coffee. Well, okay, we'll get into this later. By the way, Nastasia brings up something like that. There's someone later made a comment that basically that Nastasia. You should pick on me more so that the arguments seem like... Well, she has, she says she agrees because what she wants you, the listener to feel. is that somehow, like I only pick on her. Instead, what actually happens. I'll just give you a, here's the thing. So, uh, for a living, Nastasia and I try to tell people what they should be eating, you know, not what they should be eating in a way you should eat this, but try to help people make better decisions, to make things better, to do a better

[1:27] job making food, using technology or otherwise, whether it's with cooking issues, whether it's at Booker and Dax, whether it's at the museum of food and drink, we spend all of our time trying to increase the quality and not the snobbery, but the quality of

[1:40] uh, what people can produce and do produce and do consume, right? So, like, what nostalgia will do is not once or twice or 3 or 4 or 20 or 120 times, but

[1:53] more, poke me with things that she knows will bother me. For instance, her favorite coffee happens to be from one of those quilted, like, boxes on the side of the street with wheels. You guys know what I'm talking about? Also joined in the studio with our intrepid engineer and the guy who keeps the entire heritage radio running Jack

[2:09] Insley over there. Hello. Yeah. Jack, you know what I'm talking about? those quilted, those quilted, like, they got like stale bagels and coffee in them. So, Nastasia, her point is that she likes to say that this is her favorite coffee because, and the 1st 30 or 40 times, I didn't let it irritate me.

[2:27] And then, because it's not like, I could say, hey, look, Nastasia, you enjoy that coffee, right? It's not that you don't enjoy it because somehow you enjoy going down to the cesspool that is your street and

[2:39] and buying a coffee from this guy and somehow that's an enjoyable human interaction that doesn't involve hipsters.

[2:45] Because folks, Nastasia hates hipsters. And, yeah, hates them. And good coffee and hipsters in this city, they go together. Do they not jack? Most cities. Yeah. Yes. Okay, fair. Fair. Okay. Uh, she hates going to uh, Starbucks because she hates corporations and and people who work in them. Jack, you can agree with that. Oh absolutely. Yeah, yeah, but she so she hates that. And she hates the general alternative, which are hipsters, right? Because you're not, it's hard to get unless they're an owner, like a 50-year-old non-hipster to sit around and make you a coffee all day. Jack, am I correct about this? You're spot on. Yeah. Good coffee is good coffee, though. That's what I'm saying. And there's no snobbery to enjoying good coffee. It's just, it's, it's a right, it's a ritual. Like, literally, there are peasants somewhere, most likely, picking the coffee cherries that they then

[3:36] processed or shipped all the way around the world to make a cup of coffee for you. Respect it. That's all I'm saying. Respect the coffee. You have a caller. Okay, call her. you were on the air. Hey there, Dave. I wanted to ask about pressure cooking. I am in the enthusiast category, not a home chef and have been listening to your show for a while. Long enough that I memorized the phone number, which is a little scary to me. Wow, cool. because I forgot to mention it. Good. Uh, and uh, uh, that was it. I can't really afford this, the sous vide equipment, the low, the low temperature right now, but I did get a pressure cooker, and because I've heard you mention it a bunch of times, and I was curious about some recipes. I hadn't really heard you talk too much about like, what the pressure cookies really good for. I really, I got it in the mail and I was like, well, what do I do with this? Okay, what kind of pressure cooker do you have? Uh, it's just a, it's a 6th quart and I, I can't remember the brand. Does it vent or does it not vent? Like, in other words, when it's when it's running, does it constantly put steam out or not? I haven't even tried again. So the pressure cookers in general, they all pressure cookers that you that you buy. It's gas or it's electric? It's, uh, it's stove. Yeah, so all stovetop units, basically, can either generate 5 PSI of pressure or 15, right? And so they. Yeah, yeah, no, you could do, in other words, they're usually setable to do either. Oh, I see. Okay, great. Right. most of the recipes that I do are based on 15. The main difference is, is that certain pressure cookers have a pressure regulating mechanism in them that regulates pressure without venting

[5:21] steam. So they use a spring and you actually can see like a spring traveling up without any steam coming out of the units. Notably, Coon recon has ones like that. Then other pressure cookers. They let you know they're at pressure and they regulate their pressure by emitting steam. And so you have to have steam emitting from it, a little bit, not a lot, in order to judge whether you've reached the proper pressure or not. Okay. So one of the great things to do with pressure cookers is stocks, stocks and soups. What you need to realize when you're doing that, when you're making soups in general, in a pressure

[5:58] cooker is that pressure cooking drastically mutes the flavor of things like

[6:03] onions, it gets rid of a lot of their pungency, but it also amplifies their sweetness.

[6:07] So I like a lot of that sweetness from onions. So I like, I quadruple my onion base in a recipe, right? But things like carrots, they stay sweet, but they don't get more or less sweet or celery. So if you just take the classic mirepoix there. Okay. But what happens is you get extremely fast removal of gelatin and flavor from the meats. So you can do a pressure cooked stock in 15 minutes,

[6:36] right? And then you let it come down and then you can do, you can put a 2nd set of bones into a 2nd stock. I could do a triple stock, which is extremely indulgent, I grant you. But in about an hour. The trick is, if you're a pressure cooker is the kind of pressure cooker that releases steam,

[6:53] I found that there's a flavor degradation in, in the stock versus regular, regular production, it's still faster, it's still

[7:03] good. But a pressure cooker that does not really release steam, makes a stock that in my estimation and the people have tasted. darker, meatier, and tastes better and has better flavor than regular cook stock and is also faster. Whereas if you have one that releases steam, then the flavor is not quite as good as regularly produced stock. Still good, but not quite as good as regularly produced stock, but it still is quicker. One way around this is something that I learned actually from, um, mirror old and young and and Maxim, uh, from uh, modernist

[7:37] cuisine, is they actually do smaller stocks inside of mason jars

[7:41] in the pressure cooker. So when you're doing that, there's a couple of advantages. We're doing a soup or something with meat in it that way. One, it's sterilized. If you cook it long enough. You have to know what you're doing, right? So it's shelf stable at that point. But, you know, unless you read up on it, be careful. okay? Second, there is no choice. There's no way that volatiles can leave. And so even with a pressure cooked events, you can get all the benefits of an unpressured cooker, and the 3rd one is, you can do extremely small volumes. So if you have, um, something, um, like a squab, and you don't have that many bones or some sort of game bird or anything like that where you don't have a lot of the product to begin with, you can still make a very concentrated flavorful stock because if you put it into a mason

[8:25] jar and you can get different sizes of mason jars all the way up to a liter and a half if you wanted to, uh,

[8:30] then uh, you can make those things very concentrated in small quantities.

[8:34] So that's a good thing to do. Another great thing with pressure cookers is pressure cooking eggs. You let them, you let them hard boil for a couple of minutes with the lid off. then just so that they're set so that they don't rupture, then you bring them up from cold. Then you close the pressure cooker, allowed to come up to 15 psi, cook it for between 45 minutes, an hour and 10 minutes, let it come down naturally. if you vent it. Uh, the eggs could explode. And then when they're cool, you'll open them. You'll see that they're brown, and they'll have the, out, the whites will have a kind of nutty toastiness, and the yolks will have an aroma of kind of giblet, gravy, kind of chicken livery aroma, which I find

[9:15] uh, quite awesome. And that's due to my art reactions in it. Pressure cooking mustard seeds in vinegar. You have to blanch them once or twice to get rid of the dirty taste. Then after you pressure cooked them in vinegar, then drain them and toss them in sugar, makes an amazing garnish. Horseradish, grated, again, blanch to get rid of the dirty flavor, pressure cooked. You can make horseradish purees that taste of horseradish, but aren't very pungent. I actually use the pressure cooker all the time. And this is something I don't normally do. I would never do this to serve someone. in a restaurant situation because I would just do a long cooked braise. But, um, pork shoulder, just hacked up with a bunch of, uh, you know, you just get like, you know, your 3 or 4 favorite ground dried chilies and, uh, you know, pork shoulder and

[10:03] even a, even, you know, I always have the, I always, I always use chicken stock because I always have chicken stock in my freezer, but any kind of stock in there, uh, and just very minimal amounts of

[10:11] liquid. The trick with pressure cooking is a minimal amount of liquid in there because you're not going to boil a lot of it off. But they're, they're fantastic for, you know, for, for all of these things. And then you can get into kind of crazier situations like trying to do pressure cooked caramels, but they require a little bit of tweaking. But yeah, pressure cooker, you're going to have, not only that, I don't know where you live, but summertime's coming

[10:37] on and nothing beats, uh, pressure cooking, you know, summertime pressure cooking is awesome because you can, you could tear off

[10:43] uh, a lot of ingredients in it without releasing a lot of heat into your kitchen because once they're at pressure, they have, they're very, very

[10:50] efficient, once they're at pressure. Because remember, you have to throttle it way down once they're cooking. So I think you're going to, I think you're going to enjoy it. Cool. Thanks. Hey thank you. one quick comment for Jack. Oh, Jack, here you go, Jack. What's up with the reverb button? At the end of the show, the reverb button always goes off over the credit. Wow. It makes me very happy that somebody noticed that. Thanks. That's just that's just to keep me entertained back here. Yeah. Thanks man. Nice. Nice. Speaking of, thank you very much. I was listening, by the way, quite correct. Call your questions 2 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. All right, so back to Nastasia and Her Coffee. The main point of that was, the main point was that is that she'll say something like, I don't like that kind of coffee, and to you, the listener, when, and

[11:39] I, I, on purpose, knew she was going to do something like this, so I didn't go crazy. But when I go completely bonkers when she says something like that, it's because it's as though she's opening a wound that hasn't even healed

[11:52] yet, that she's been stabbing me with the same knife for like 2.5 , 3 months. And this that particular one years. So her one of her little joys in life is to set up these situations where she can make me look like a tyrant in

[12:06] public, uh, through this kind of careful application of minor

[12:11] irritants over long periods of time. It's not that calculated. really not. I mean, that just comes naturally to you? Anyway, hopefully I'll come back with an appreciation. for coffee. Is are you going are you going to see Dwayne or hipsters? Yeah, or histsters. Right, right. You know, Portland, Portland, many great things have come from Portland. Andy Ricker. Jack, you going to see them out there? Jack, you been to that restaurant yet? Pacpak? No. What the hell's wrong with you? Jesus. It's in your hipster part of town. Wow. Damn. Also, speaking of reaver button. I listened to a little bit of the show to check how the iTunes worked. I sound like I'm on coke most of the time. I'm trying to speak slower today. Like, I'm telling you guys, I'm not on, like, my drug of choice is alcohol and consumed, hopefully responsibly on most occasions. What? That's what my drug, my drug is rage, rage. Yeah, rage. Anyway. So I'm trying to speak a little bit more slowly today. If you guys have any opinions on whether I should speak at this pace or at my normal pace, give me a call. can't help it. Like, I'm trying right now. deliberately slowing myself down, so I don't sound like I'm... I want to know if people like the personal antidotes that you that you say, tell. Like what? I don't know, just some of your stories I enjoy. Like when it's all scientific and food. I told people, you know, call in about waffles, anything. We'll talk about anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No question is too stupid. That should be the new tagline for the show. No question too stupid. No host. No host too smart, no question too stupid. All right, there we go. Dave and Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, which was abbreviated here to NTHL. take you to figure out. What? Did you get that right away? I didn't. You didn't? Yeah, well, you don't yeah, whatever. Okay. Greetings for New Hampshire. Chris Anderson in the monitor's pantry pointed me to your show and I've been enjoying the podcast with Memorial Day around the corner. Oh my god, it is around the corner. Nastasia's going directly, by the way, from Portland to Mirvold in Seattle to Japan. And I'm making her fly to all those locations with three. Count them 3 red hot pokers. Oh that's fine. I have a stop in Philadelphia. See? What the hell's wrong with you? Hey, listen, Nastasia, here's the thing. I'm sorry, I'm going to get to your question in one second. Here's the thing. Nastasia and I are the 2 cheapest people on earth. We are so freaking cheap that even though we're out on the

[14:34] L-train, like, how many transfers do I got to get to take a subway with all my stuff to the to the

[14:39] airport to LaGuardia, so I can, I'm like, listen, Nastasia, listen, we have a company now. Booker, I want everyone to listen to this. Booker and Dax will pay for you to take a car service to

[14:52] LaGuardia, the airport. That's funny. was looking for the applause and I found that. Yeah, which is even better. Yeah, but it would be it would be hard to, um, it would be hard to kind of understand the

[15:07] deeply ingrained cheapness that nastasia I had in general. We're some cheap people. Anyway, okay, so with Memorial Day around the corner. Can you summarize some specific time, temperature and prep recommendations for low temperature for insurance and other low temperature cookout dishes off the top of my head

[15:25] are sausage and beer, hamburger, fried chicken, strip steak,

[15:29] ribeye, and others? I have a polycine circulator, and will likely cook, chill, retherm, and finish on the grill slash fryer, et cetera.

[15:36] How do you guesstimate minimum return time for a mixed pot of proteins? Is the maximum whole time 4 hours minus the cook time? Uh, and there's another question, but this, that, which I'm going to get in one second. In fact, I might do it later because it's going to take me a 1000000 years to answer that one, and Nastasia doesn't want to hear about any science, apparently. But these questions are from Rob Treypas. And by the way, thank you for telling me how to pronounce your name because there's no way I would have gotten it off the spelling. What would your guess have been? No, I don't know, but I knew you were going to appreciate that. And I did too. Yeah, yeah, we appreciate that kind of thing. We appreciate it. Unless your name's Smith, in which case I know how to pronounce that already. Okay. Uh, so, on retherm time. By the way, don't worry. Everything on how long you can hold a meat depends on the temperature of the bath. If the bath temperature is extremely low. So if I'm doing, so 1st of all, your 1st question was cooking for insurance. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's what you do is you use low temperature cooking, which is using a water bath or a combi oven or

[16:34] CVAP is using a very, very accurate temperature to cook the meat all the way through.

[16:40] Now, the meat at this point is not finished. In general, when I do cooking for insurance, low temperature for insurance. I don't do any kind of pre-treatments to it at all. All I'm doing is assuring that the center of the meat is cooked exactly where I

[16:52] want it to be. And then I cool it. Okay? And so for chicken, breast, it would be 63

[16:59] degrees, Celsius, for chicken leg, it would be 65, 66 degrees, Celsius, for ribsteak, it would be 55 degrees, Celsius. And, you know, the list goes on and on for sausage. It would be, I usually do 60 or 140 degrees. It's a little pink in the center, but I like it that way. Did you like the brats we had? Yeah, I love them. That was 60 degrees. Pat Lafrita donated to the museum food and drink event we had last week. Thank you for people that have been to our fundraisers in the past. And Pat Lafrida made up a bunch of delicious brats. We circulated them in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Brewery gave us a bunch of beer, graciously gave us beer to circulate the brats in, and we circulated the brats at 140

[17:43] degrees Fahrenheit, 60 degrees Celsius, and then grilled them off. Man, were those good. They really good. Man, on Martin's potato rolls. What's the name of the mustard we got? That was good mustard too. Look it up. That was delicious mustard. Anyway, delicious. So what you do is you cook it all the way through. And then when you're finishing them, and a lot of times we don't retherm when you're doing for insurance, we don't retherm using

[18:07] or reheat using low temperature. We just do traditional cooking methods. So if you're doing a prime rib. Here's my recommendation for a prime rib. Cook an entire prime rib to 55 degrees all the way through. Now it's medium rare, rare, medium rare in the center. It's good, right? Whole thing's good. Now, let it cool down. Wrap it. Let it cool down. Put it into a very hot oven and just wait for the crust to develop. What you want is that nice, crispy crust on the outside, and with a prime rib, actually. You want a little bit of overcooked stuff on the outside. Otherwise, a prime rib doesn't look appetizing when you cut through it because it's all one color of meat. But all you need to focus on is delicious crust because the inside is already cooked to where you want it, right? And so that's the essence of cooking for insurance. Duck breast, 57 degrees Celsius, about 135 Fahrenheit. You want to cook it for 45 minutes. Make sure you flatten the breast so that the skin will render later, let it cool down. And then all you need to focus on is searing off the skin. And searing off the skin will reheat the meat enough to serve it, but it's not going to overcook it because you're just focused on the

[19:09] skin, so your pan heat can be a little bit higher than it normally would. Right? So, uh, and basically anything can be can be done that way. Hamburgers, I do it 55 to 57, depending on how squeamish the people are who are eating it. Uh, and then on a hamburger, uh, a hamburger, sometimes you can even like cool all the way down. You got to be a little careful to not let oxygen in the bag. Otherwise it's going to be a problem with rancidity when it reheats, especially if it sits overnight, which you don't want to do.

[19:36] And then, you know, you can let it cool down and then deep fry it and they're great. Ribsteak. If you're going to serve it right away, I would drop the temperature to 50 degrees Celsius, but not if you're going to serve

[19:49] it in a health department kind of, but I do that at home, but don't let it sit very long at 50. I would only let us sit a couple of hours at 50 C because there you're at the borderline where bacteria are going to start coming back to life. They won't, but, you know, you don't want to be in that situation too long. But if you're holding something like a sausage above the temperature at which bacteria or dying, and the temperature keeps getting revised down and down. But sausage you can hold easily at 140 or even lower.

[20:15] You're going to be killing bacteria. You can hold it for infinity, basically. You know, the texture will start going down, but you can hold it for infinity. Um, how's that sound? Is that good? All right. I'm going to come back to your other question after the commercial break and answer a little bit later on

[20:33] cheeses. Come back, cookie issues.

[21:11] You'll only come out tonight I mean a hungry time. Nothing new, I've seen it here before. Watching a wedding Was she sitting with you when you got her eyes around the door? So many a pain to see. What you think? You get it for free? The woman's wild, she can't tap by the perfect eye you want. Money's a matter If you're in it for love, you ain't gonna get too far. The following program was sponsored by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons. Summertime is not the only time when barbecue is welcome. At S. Wallace Edwards and Sons, Sam Edwards has been working his magic on ribs, briskets,

[22:08] hip cooked pulled pork, and much, much more. Add a few of their sides, and the party is complete. Entertaining has never been so easy. To order, go to virginitraditions.com. The reverb busting it out. Call any questions? Oh, you have a caller right now, but let me just say this before I tend to call her on. I like myself from Sam Edwards ham. Sam Edwards, though? does not enjoy the potty mouth. Does not don't curse around Sam Edwards. It's true. traditional man. Color, you're on the air. All right, uh, well, you know, I hear Natasha's coming to Portland. So I don't actually have a question. I do have one about the pressure cooking stock in the camera pool. But I do have a suggestion, uh, which is, if you only go to one brewery in Portland, it would be go to the Cascade Brewing Barrel House, which is fantastic, and all they have is sour beer.

[23:00] And it's constantly changing, and it's probably the, uh, the best place. Like in general? Yeah, no, no, like seriously, in, in general, I, you testimony to choose from, it's the one

[23:18] place you just keep going back. It's changing all the time. There's, uh, it's like seriously, the best place in general. The cheese bar is good too. Awesome. I'll check it out. So what's it called? Cascade? Cascade Brewing? Cascade Brewing. barrel house. It's on, it's on Belmont. It's, it's just constantly changing sour beer and it's, uh, it's a fantastic value. as well. And they specialize in sour and sour beers, like, uh, like, uh, Rodenbach style or what? Well, they have, they have some roden box now, but they'll do, they'll do everything from, uh, from sour wheat beers, uh,

[23:54] to, and then, and then they'll barrel age them, and then they'll serve some of them live from the barrel. Um, and uh, they'll add. I mean, the most random fruits and nuts that I haven't, uh,

[24:07] trying to remember, there's ones like a, I can't even pronounce the nut that they put in

[24:13] there. But it was, it was fantastic. No, Nastasia likes it, actually. If she's going to have a beer, it's hard to get her to have it, frankly, which I don't want to bring up right now. But she likes beer with acidity. I do. So she, this might maybe be the place for her again. I hope to hear back from her on how much she enjoyed it. Yeah thank you so much. Yeah. I got the stock in the in the can, though, when you're when you're canning. What does the, if you, if you add any aromatics or, uh, or, uh, you know, when you add vegetables to it? Does that, or are you talking about just making it with the, with the bones? Because

[24:48] when, with those breakdown or something, if you listen in a can for a while? Have you left them a long time? Probably. I mean, uh, you know, the ones they were doing, they were doing almost like, um, I mean, think about

[24:59] confites are done in jars all the time and they're delicious and there's bones in them. So once it stops cooking, you're not going to get that much more extraction, I mean, in other words, I don't think you're going to be ripping the calcium out of it, if that's what you mean. Dependent because it's not going to be acidic. You know what I'm saying? Um, and in things like comfit that are often jugged or can processed,

[25:21] um, they're fine for for a long period of time, but I think in modern cuisine, they were making just smaller versions of

[25:28] stocks. I haven't seen that section in a long time. So you're stretching my memory banks. And when I did get to look at it, I have to make a confession, I don't own it yet. So I've only gotten to look at it when I have like pawed through it at the events I've gone to. Do you know what I mean? So, so, and I mean, I know all those guys, and I've, I talk to those guys all the time, and, and I've read, you know, chunks of it, but literally sitting at a library, you know, not, uh,

[25:57] and I will own it. I'm not, it's worth the money. You know what I mean? But I just don't own it yet. Because it meant if I told my wife, hey, honey, I spent $500 on a book. What? You know what I mean? Any booker and Dax alone a copy. We keep it at the what's it called? Uh, so yeah, so uh, did that answer your question? Yeah, I think it does. I have a question for the caller, actually. Twitter. Twitter wants to know if that brewery uses spontaneous fermentation. You know, I believe they have their own cultures now, so

[26:28] they there, it's actually in the barrels now. And so when they, when they put the beer into the barrel, um, it picks up all the uh, lactamacillus and uh, botanomyces

[26:40] and uh, whatever else is in there. And so they've got, uh, they've got different barrels, and then they'll blend some of them together towards the end. But I'm not sure if that originally came from spontaneous fermentation, if, if the cultures that are in the

[26:55] barrel. But I, I think they are because they have their own, um, they get like all their, all their fruit from around here and they just, they just let it go. They're really really, really good. Cool. Thanks. We also have another caller, guys. All right, call her. you on the air. Hi, David, it's Andy from Chicago. Hey. Hey, how you guys doing today? All right. Good, good. Hey, I had a meal at Charlie Trotter's last Thursday at the kitchen table. was incredible. when are they closing that down? When are they closing down? Hey, I'm not having trouble hearing you. I think I might need a call back. Well, you talked, all right, you call back in a second. I want to hear about the dinner, Charlie. Give a call right back. I will, thanks. So while he's waiting to call back, Michael Nakkin from Urba Voracious, uh, wrote in. And, uh, thank us for mentioning the book. We've read the book. I enjoyed the book. And by the way, it gives a well-deserved shout out. He does two iceberg lettuce which is delicious. I like iceberg lettuce. Who doesn't like iceberg lettuce? It's some crunchy, cool refreshing stuff. Jack, are you with me? I'm on board. Nastasia even is on board. Where all 3 of us are on board for iceberg lettuce, and for Michael

[28:02] Nakkin, from Aber Voracious. He wrote back. He would like to be on one of our shows. Let him know what you think would be a good fit. You cook them on this show if you wanted to. We could have a talk. I don't know if you want to. You could, if that's what you wanted to do. He just was in New York and didn't stop by the Booker and Dex because he went to a Terra, which he gave an amazing review to the, have you been there?

[28:23] With Mark. Just seems like the kind of place you would go. Apparently, amazing new place, platform New York magazine, gave it 4 stars. I haven't been because I haven't been, but he says very good things about... Callers back, by the way. All right, call her. you are on the air. Hey Dave, this is Andy again. Is that better? you hear me? Yeah, yeah, I can hear you. going on? Good, good. So Charlie Trotter, when are they closing down? They're closed in August. I think August 31st or something like that. All right, so you're one of the last people to ever eat there. I think I was. And in fact, the group that I went with, we loved it so much. try to go again on the very last day that they're open. It was just, you know, it was incredible. I mean, being in the kitchen and actually seeing everybody cook and uh, you know, serving us right there. It was just, uh, really an experience of a lifetime and a couple of my dining companions actually got were able to get up and

[29:13] help, help some of the chefs like prepare, prepare some of the dishes near the end. So was it as clean as it is famously purported to be? It was pretty clean. Yeah, we ended up staying there until like 130 AM or something like that and they were scrubbing the heck out of that thing by the time they were done. Yeah I was pretty impressed. With the cleanliness. Charlie's, uh, he's, uh, he's kind of got a coarse mouth, which is pretty fun. He's, it seems like he's having fun in the last few months that he's open. So wait, so you're saying the floor is clean, but his mouth is not. That's exactly right. Yes. Yeah. But that's the important thing, you know. Yeah exactly. Well, he famously said once that you could almost review a restaurant just by looking at its floor in the kitchen. Interesting. You know, I think I've heard that now that you say that, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of one of his better known statements. Yeah. Well, I like it, you know, like you taking clean establishments, and that was one of the cleaner ones. I've, well, I mean, I've never been in a real, you know, rarely been in a real restaurant kitchen before, so this was, uh, but I was, I was

[30:09] impressed nonetheless. Nice. Yeah, so they did kind of this like, uh, this, uh,

[30:13] beat terrain, and I was wondering, what do you think they used? to use anything to bind it together? or how, you know? I imagine it would be cooked at a fairly high temper? Would you cook the beets beforehand and then just put them in a tureen and let them chill and set? what do you think? Was it served hot or cold? Yeah, so they combined it with almost anything then. Do you serve cold? I mean, classically, obviously, you would buy something like a gelatin. If you wanted to stay, um, if you wanted to stay vegetarian, I would use a combination of, um, if you want that gelatin like feel, that awesome mouthfield of gelatin, I would use a mixture of kappa

[30:49] carraginen and locust bean gum, the kappa carraginen by itself is brittle, and the locust being gum when you add it to it, um, softens it. So it's like, JS, so it's like gelatin, but it still can remelt, so you can use it. If you wanted to heat it, I mean, you could use Agar. The problem with Agar is it's not 100% clear, so it's not going to look as shiny. Do you know what I'm saying? Uh, as, as, as kappa plus the special LBG that CP Coco serves will

[31:15] use? Uh, you could also use uh, something called gelan gum. Gelan is not going to be as flexible if you use a clear one. It's going to be a little more brittle, but then you could deep fry it. Cool. Yeah, that, oh, wow. Deep fried. Yeah that would be incredible. Yeah. The problem with Jell-An, if you're going to use Jell-An, is that you have

[31:32] to, um, you have to heat the beats before you pour it on or you're going to get some pre-gelling problem. Do you know what I mean? Uh, Agar is going to be a little simpler to work with, but, uh, Kappa Carragin and LBG, which is, uh, I think Modernist has a, has a version of that, uh, somewhere. That mixture is really good or just straight up gelatin. Gelatin is great as long as your kitchen's not going to be too hot and you're going to serve it cold. Yeah, and I'm not too worried about, you know, keeping it veggie or vegan. So I think gelton would probably be the way to go. But yeah, it was really nice. Real golden beach is gorgeous. Another quick question. I called in last summer about a ham. curing in my attic, and unfortunately, I went up there a couple of weeks ago, and I've got bugs. I hate that. Beatles or mites? What was the 1st one? Beatles? I think they're mites. Well, they're little, they look to be little grubby type things. Um, you know, they leave kind of a sawdust looking, what I assume is some sort of feces, you know, around where they're, where

[32:33] they're shooting. Basically, there was a little bit of a taint in up near the phone. There was a little bit of extra skin removed and a little too much exposure. I don't think I got it salted quite well enough when I 1st you know, when I 1st cured it. And so there's always been a little bit of a taint up there, but until a few weeks ago, you know, no sign of any other type of contamination.

[32:51] So you think there's, yeah, what do I do? Am I am I just screwed? I mean, or do you think there's some way, is there a way you know, cut the rest of it around the bugs or what do you think? Okay, so you're in Chicago, yeah? I am yeah. So you're probably pretty much like New York. I mean, they have other things like skippers down south that cause problems, but in our kind of latitudes. The 2 main enemies of ham are different varieties of boring

[33:16] beetle and mites. So boring beetle, you'll see holes in the meat just above the

[33:24] fat line. Did you see those? Are there holes in the meat? I couldn't really tell, like the place, the butcher job wasn't, wasn't very good. You know, they, they, uh, there, it was clear that the pig was hung from this legs. There's like a little bit of split, you know, in the tendon by the, uh, what do you call it, the, uh, um, Gamble, gamble holes, basically. Uh, so I haven't had the chance to really inspect it that closely to see where it is, but it's not on the

[33:50] face. It's all up by the uh, up by the, the bone. I'm hanging it, uh, you know, hock, hock up, shoot us up. haven't noticed. I mean, well, the good news is, is that the taint can be cut away and the rest of the ham

[34:01] is is okay. And that, uh, you know, I've I've had a lot of beetle damage before on hams. had hanging, but they were always on the face, but for those of you

[34:13] that don't know, we're talking about the face is the portion of meat that the bone projects out of that was attached to the pig.

[34:18] And I usually see beetle damage right at the fat line on the face side, right? Not on, not through the skin because the skin's a lot harder to attack than the face. So the boring beetle damage that I've had has been on the face side. So it's probably not that. If you're not seeing individual bugs, but just kind of dust on the ground, that's probably

[34:39] mites, and those mites, like the dust is actually mites, and not feces, it's actually mites. The good news there, brush off the mites and you're good to go. The bad news, the bad news. Once you have mites in your attic, you have mites in your freaking attic, and like even if you wait for a year and hang another ham, you're going to get mites on that ham. So, yeah. So, like, there are things you can treat your your, uh, attic with that, uh, I forget

[35:06] what, I forget the name of them because I've never, I've never tried to do it. I also now have mites in my house. So when I hang hams, I get mites. It's not going to hurt it. You can brush them off. It's not a problem. I think I did see some actual little grubby larva looking thing, so it's probably not the mite. Oh, but that was probably on the tape section. Oh, yeah, good point. Right, right, right. Maybe it's just, you know, fine or something like that. Right, that could be flies. Any kind of fly, like blow fly or anything like that. you know, things like that. because they'll eat, um, that section, whereas they won't eat the really cured part. I mean, cut cut yourself a good section around that that tainted portion. And to be honest, there's not that much meat up there anyway. You're not losing that much. What you're losing is a couple good soups. That's it. You know what I mean? And the rest of your ham should be fine. Yeah, you can give that up and the rest of your ham should be fine. Yeah, and, you know, frankly, it's been a good experiment, but, you know, for the quality of ham you can get from, you know, Finch Bill and Nuisance and stuff like that.

[35:58] Not that expensive and pretty freaking Incredibles. So this might be my last stab at it, but at least I can salvage this one. Yeah, but you know what? It's rewarding and there is a learning curve to it. Um, you know, you might want to check out uh, Dr. Norman Marriott, uh, formerly, he's

[36:15] Emeritus at, uh, I think a Virginia Tech, has a pretty good PDF available online, uh, with, yeah, with troubleshooting on, uh, on, on ham

[36:25] caring, if you want to give it again. I unfortunately don't have a place that I can hang one. So I haven't, I haven't done, but as soon as I get a house out in the middle of nowhere to, you know, take my kids

[36:35] to when I'm not in New York City, I'll be hanging up some pork, believe it or not, believe me believe it. I think I'm looking at a curing chamber too. Uh, you know, cured meats blog. Jason Molinari, I think he's written in a couple of times. He's got a, you know, some good, good DIY curing chamber tips. So I think that, uh, hopefully that'll help, uh, I'd like to try some other type

[36:54] of uh, salumi and things like that as well. Yeah, it is. It is the age of the DIY. Thank God. an exciting time to be alive. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. Cool. Thanks so much. Thank you. Yep, gotcha. Bye. Jack, can we do one more commercial break? Sure. Call your questions to this. What is it? 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128, cooking and use?

[37:20] But I don't mind stealing brilliant, one miles of

[37:28] drag. But I can't feed on the bowel else when my cups already over me.

[37:45] Yeah, yeah, yeah,

[37:52] yeah, yeah. Yeah. What you don't know is, is that my cousins are from Seattle and we're always doing like the weird Eddie Vedder stuff when we're cooking. By the way, I pre-apologize to everyone for not getting to... going to be able to get to all the questions today, right, Stas? Well, let's do them for Japan. We're going to try and do cooking issues from Japan. Can we do that, Jack? Yeah, let's do it. Cooking issues from Tokyo. All right, prep kitchen. What? Yeah, we're going to be in the in the prep kitchen. Yeah, it's awesome. Okay. Dear Nastasia, Dave, and Jack. Love the show. Appreciate how accessible you make it for us to not in the industry full-time. I've learned a lot and had a chance to use much of what you talk about. Thank you. This is from Alan Freeman, by the way. And he expects us all to be killed by vegan terrorists, but you first, Nastasia. Just saying. Um, I'm curious whether current microwave technology is at all interesting. I have a chance to get a very cheap new microwave with continuous amplitude control rather than traditional pulse width, full-on full-oss cycling, but it wouldn't be worth the hassle of swapping out and disposing of the old

[38:54] one, if there's nothing really new and interesting, I can do with it. I've never really used a microwave for anything other than leftovers and melting chocolate, but perhaps there are fun techniques that you could share. Thanks, Alan. And then a little note to Ben as much fun as playing with old microwave was as a rather reckless young geek. I may be more averse to self-immolation these days. Alan. Okay, true story. Look, having done it several times, please don't chop up your microwave

[39:17] oven. There are dangerous voltages in there. If you defeat the safety in our locks, you can nuke your eyeballs with

[39:23] microwaves, and then they turn white like a cooked egg, never to unwhite. Uh, yeah. So, please don't mess with your, excuse me, please don't mess with your microwaves. That said, I've done it several times. But the trick here, for those of you who don't know what the hell we're talking about. When you put a microwave, a standard microwave, on half power. Have you noticed this, Nastasia? You have a microwave? Have you ever had a microwave? You notice how it goes... And the light dims a little bit? That's because it doesn't actually change the power level. It just turns the magnetron off and on for a specific amount of time. And it actually takes a little bit of time. The magnetron, by the way, is the thing that's generating the microwave. That's what it's called. It's called the magentron. And it takes a while for the magnetron to heat up start generating the, you know, to actually start producing appreciable amounts of microwave. So they time the, uh, the duty cycle, not the duty cycle, the, uh,

[40:19] the, the full cycle, how long that cycle is, meh, meh, to, uh, take advantage of the fact that the magnetron has a little bit of a time lag between when you apply power and when the microwave come out.

[40:29] So 80% power, it's on 80% of the time and then off 20. 100% power, it's on 100% of the time.

[40:37] And the theory with microwaves is that that's okay because you're hitting it with full power and then turning it off and the food gets to cool off and it all averages

[40:45] out. Continuous control is something that allows you

[40:50] to actually change the amount of power that the microwave is putting out on a continuous basis.

[40:57] I've always wanted one to do very controlled, delicate work on defrosting and things like that, but I've never used one. So I can't say whether or not it's actually any better.

[41:07] The one time I tried to build one. I was trying to do microwave dehydration in a vacuum, and so the idea is, is that you use a microwave to boil the inside of, so microwaves penetrate

[41:20] food, and so you're actually boiling the liquids out on the inside of a product. And that is advantageous if you're trying to dry it in the presence of a vacuum to, instead of freeze drying, if you don't have it to do things like dehydrated grapes, without them having shrunk like

[41:35] raisins, because the positive pressure of the water boiling out keeps them in the proper shape as they're going. The issue is, I had a lot of issues, but I wanted to control the power so

[41:45] it didn't overheat, but my temperature control, my, I had a thermocouple in there, and it was arcing like a bastard because as soon as you apply microwaves in a vacuum, a partial

[41:57] vacuum, you get huge plasma balls rolling around and lighting everything on fire on the inside of the

[42:02] microwave. I then was trying to do power control on it of my own kind of accord. It was a complete nightmare, horrible. I don't recommend doing it. That said, I've always been interested in actual continuous controlled microwave, but I don't know. I don't really know. I mean, and all of my microwave tricks are like really crappy things to do to somebody else's microwave at a party at this point, which I can't really, I don't really want to talk about on theater, because there's plenty of websites that'll teach you how to do it, right,

[42:27] Styles? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um... Take another question. Uh, hey, uh, Dave, Nastasia and Jack went to the NRA show recently and scored a deal for a polycience professional circulator package for about 50% off. By the way, good tip. If you're going to trade shows. The last day of the trade show, people don't want to carry that crap home. So what you can do is make a deal with them, preferably early in the trade show to buy their units before they go home. This way, they don't have to take them home and you can get usually dealer price or sometimes even slightly below dealer price at

[43:00] trade shows. Good little tip. I do not have a vacuum sealer, food saver style, nor chamber. I will receive the circulator soon and had a couple of questions. Can you leave proteins in the Cryovac packaging to cook sous vide? Perhaps you just give up the ability to pre-seer season and marinate. Okay, the problem with that, a lot of crime evac bags that are

[43:20] shipped aren't shipped. They're not cooked chill bags. And so you, they're not gonna, they're not gonna melt in the, at the temperatures you're using in a circulator, but they're not necessarily rated for

[43:29] heating, and so I can't guarantee that there's no sort of plastic. I can't guarantee the plastic safety at temperature. That's it. I done it many times. And basically, it's very good for things like sous vide for, or low temperature and sous vide for insurance purposes, but don't do it if you don't trust

[43:50] a bag. Um, what's the problem with air in the bag while cooking a sous vide or low temp? There's 2 problems with air. One is that it can cause an issue where it doesn't heat as quickly. And so in shorter cook things, it can, um, it can lead to spots that aren't cooked as

[44:06] well in very, very long cooked things in the middle of the air, stops the heat penetration. You can get growth of lactobacillus in the place where there was an air pocket, if it doesn't heat quickly

[44:14] enough, and then you can get off flavors. The main problem is, is if there's air in the bag, and then you store it for a long time, there's oxygen in the bag, and you can develop rancidity in the fat, and that's

[44:26] bad, right? So that's bad. But in the short term, it's not a problem at all. And finally, if I use low temp ziploc approach, which you can see on cookingissues.com, I give step-by-step with pictures. What limitations, safety, et cetera, are there with regards to length of time in the bath or temperature use as the bagging is

[44:44] not quite a vacuum. There are no limitations on time. I've done limit. I've only cooked up to 3 days in one, but there's no limitations. I wouldn't do anything that's cooked higher than about 70 degrees C, but that's, in other words, not vegetables. Almost anything else. I would cook in a Ziploc bag and it's a great technique. I do that all the time. Uh, thanks. I love the show. I'm looking forward to checking out Booker and Dax next time in New York City. Nastasia, here it is. Please pick on Dave more on the air, so it does not seem so one-sided. Stop by the bar, then you'll see it. Wow. What, see, what, you picking on me live? Maybe you have to come early. mainly at the bar. I'm mainly at the bar early. Do you know what I mean? We so many other interesting questions that I didn't get a chance to do today. We have one in. We're not going to get any questions this week because of Memorial Day, so... So we can get

[45:31] them. So Colin has a question on pressure cooking marmalades. Marty wants to know about meat analogs. Uh, I, you know, I still didn't get to Rob's question on emulsifying sauce, uh, salts with uh, processed cheese and

[45:43] the uh, studies that I was looking at where they're making ketchup flavor processed cheese and we could talk about our ketchup chocolate that we did back in the day.

[45:49] So many, many interesting things that we didn't get to on the air today. I promise to get to them all. Hopefully live from Tokyo next week, cooking issues.

[46:05] Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archives programs on heritageradionetwork.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes

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